F5 Networks - Brochure

C O M P A N YO V E R V I E W

F5 Networks Saudi Arabia Innovate, Expand, DeliverWritten by: Abigail Phillips

Produced by: Craig Daniels

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F5 NETWORKS SAUDI ARABIA

F5 Networks - originally called F5 Labs - was established in 1996 and was inspired by the movie Twister, which referenced the fastest and most powerful tornado on the Fujita Scale. The company made a name for itself early on with its first product, a load balancer called BIG-IP. In essence, when a server went down or became overloaded, BIG-IP directed traffic to other servers that could handle the load. After just three years, in June 1999, the company went public and assumed the title of F5 Networks it was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Our corporate focus centres on providing network intelligence that enables customers to respond quickly to change, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and provide differentiated offerings that help increase revenue, explains Mamduh Allam, General Manager for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Through internal development and acquisition, F5 Networks has gone on to extend its reach beyond load-balancing, producing a range of integrated products for Application Delivery Networking. These seek to improve the delivery of web-based applications by attempting to make them run faster and more securely.

Core competenciesWhether it is security, availability, performance or other critical services, F5 helps deliver the most secure, fast and reliable applications to anyone, anywhere, at any time. The company is

F5 Networks on the importance of delivering the applications that matter without constraints anywhere, anytime and on any device

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dedicated to providing its clients with world-class, innovative tech solutions, whether that is in the form of security, cloud management or server upgrades. It is also passionate about developing mutually beneficial partnerships with large organisations to provide an all-encompassing technology offering.

F5 has always been focused on providing key services to applications. In 2004, it launched an application delivery controller solution focusing on a full-proxy architecture delivered by F5s Traffic Management Operating System (TMOS). This led to significant partnerships with most of the leading software providers.

F5 continued its evolution by organic investment and acquisitions, developing market-leading add-on solutions in areas such

F5 helps deliver the most secure, fast and reliable

applications to anyone, anywhere, at any time

Key Personnel Mamduh AllamSaudi Arabia General Manager, F5 Networks Mamduh is General Manager for F5 Networks in Saudi Arabia. He has significant international industry experience, joining F5 from Intigral, where he was KSA General Manager. Mamduh has also held senior roles at Microsoft and Cisco, as well as several leadership positions at technology companies in the USA. He has a bachelor degree in Mechanical CAD deisgn, and programming engineering from Eastern Michigan Universerity, USA.

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as web application security, access management, DDoS mitigation and many others. All leverage the full proxy architecture of BIG-IP and TMOS for massive scalability and performance.

The company has also put a large emphasis on ensuring its technologies are cloud-ready by enabling Virtual Edition solutions across all hypervisors, increasing their performance and density. Being at the forefront of technology and innovation is critical to the companys vision and objectives, not to mention its long term success.

To this end, in recent times, F5s key move was the 2013 launch of Synthesis, an architectural vision that promotes the delivery and orchestration of Software Defined Application Services throughout data centre, cloud, and hybrid environments. As the company

F5 Corporate video

Innovative Solutions (IS) is a specialized information security professional services company establish in 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. IS is managed by competent IT professionals with extensive local IT experience in Financial, Public, Defense, Education, Health, Oil & Gas, Utilities and IT services industries. Our strategy is to engage our customers with a consultative approach to address their business requirements while maintaining an assuring level of information security. ISs highly certified engineers provide information security solutions, consulting services and in-house developed products for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region.

PARTNER PROFILEIS

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explains: Powered by an elastic, multi-tenant and high-performance services fabric, F5 Synthesis enables customers to rapidly and cost-effectively provision layer 4-7 services, complementing existing layer 2-3 network and compute-focused efforts. A comprehensive set of management and control plane APIs ensures integration and interoperability with SDN and virtualization systems, as well as in the cloud.

As a part of its Synthesis vision, F5 Networks has been developing its flourishing partnership with Cisco over the past year. Integrating F5 SDAS into Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) enables customers to benefit from a virtualized architecture with an application fabric integrated onto a network fabric. The joint

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F5 Networks has strong coverage in all key Middle East markets

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solution facilitates virtual workload mobility and policy-driven application delivery to significantly reduce operating costs without compromising on consistent, scalable network and L4-L7 services.

F5 Networks has also benefited from a strong partnership with VMware, which includes interoperable solutions around technologies such as End User Computing, network virtualization, data centre and cloud management, and VMware vCloud Air hybrid cloud platform.

Security has been high on the agenda for the past year, as highlighted by the companys acquisition of Defense.Net in May 2014. The cloud-based security services company gives F5 a competitive edge in providing solutions to defend against application-layer, network-layer, and data center threats delivered via the Internet such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.The acquisition of Defense. Net complements existing F5 solutions such as its Advanced Firewall Manager.

In November 2014, F5 announced new hybrid service capabilities to help organizations scale IT resources across dynamic cloud and data center deployments. Under the companys new Silverline banner, F5 will offer extended security, optimization, and availability services from hosted and managed infrastructure, marking F5s entrance into the cloud services delivery space.

The F5 Silverline services delivery platform expands the companys F5 Synthesis architecture to enable application services

Powered by an elastic multi-tenant and high performance services fabric, F5 Synthesis enables customers to rapidly and cost effectively provision layer 4-7 services.customers

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within customers deployment model of choice: on-premises and/or as-a-service. Beginning with DDoS protection and security intelligence services, the Silverline platform will support additional application delivery capabilities as-a-service in the future.

Heartbleed: An example of F5 security prowess and innovation

F5 takes great pride in its security solutions and was an industry leader in response to the Heartbleed bug. Companies using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to terminate SSL connections already had the necessary protections in place to secure their applications against the Heartbleed bug. This is just one example of the companys commitment to providing its customers with leading, of-the-moment, reactive technology and security solutions.

Trends impacting businessToday however, technology is not limited to servers, PCs and business; it is everywhere, in everything we do, daily. From handheld devices, cars and watches; everything even thermostats and refrigerators are connected. So what does this mean for applications? According to Allam they have had to become more sophisticated and need more services to make them available, faster and secure.

The challenges we have to contend with are a mixture of both applications and infrastructure,

F5 Synthesis

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and are based on business requirements that push IT to be more agile and responsive. For example, mobile apps and BYOD tax both applications and network infrastructure. However, organisations and solutions are typically siloed, focusing on solving their specific issues without addressing the larger problems as a whole. These technology shifts are creating market transitions and a great opportunity for

F5 Networks wins Network Optimisation Vendor category at Network World Middle East Awards

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solutions providers that understand how to bring everything together and unlock value and new routes to innovation, he says.

One of the key drivers for us is that the traditional network borders are collapsing. In their place are seemingly disparate clusters of cloud and mobility, as well as the ever-present generation of new sources of data and higher streams of traffic. For companies

One of the key drivers for us is that the traditional network borders are collapsing. In their place are seemingly disparate clusters of cloud and mobility, as well as the ever-present generation of new sources of data and higher streams of traffic Mamduh AllamSaudi Arabia General Manager, F5 Networks

F5 Networks wins Network Optimisation Vendor category at Network World Middle East Awards

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We are growing fast, and in the past four years we have increased our headcount more than five times over.

Mamduh AllamSaudi Arabia General Manager, F5 Networks

navigating this new terrain, management and planning of infrastructure is essential, as is understanding how to get social intelligence in the connectivity fabric.

This has led to the emergence of Software Defined Application Services (SDAS), the next phase in the evolution of application delivery. SDAS is the result of delivering highly flexible and programmatic application services from a unified, high-performance application service fabric and serves to solve the significant challenges created by the Internet of Things (IoT).

Middle East presenceF5 Networks has strong coverage in all key Middle East markets based out of Saudi Arabia and United Arab of Emirates. This is supported by an extensive network of partners and account and sales managers. The company also has a professional services team entirely dedicated to the region, and second engineers to customers when major project work demands.

We are growing fast, and in the past four years we have increased our headcount more than five times over. We have a good sense of where were going in the region and are ready and able to scale to meet growing demand for our services, explains Allam.

Middle East successesThe company has already had many successes in the region and is providing critical services

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to enable growth and innovation for major clients in sectors such as finance and banking, telecommunications, government, construction, energy and retail. As the region continues to grow at a breath-taking pace, F5 services are becoming ever more appealing. For example, it is already involved in several Software Defined Network projects with telecom and other enterprise customers - projects and initiatives that will rely on fast, secure and reliable applications.

Looking aheadSo what next for the company and its Middle East operations?

As ever, we are planning to grow and invest in the region. We are driven by our customer-centricity, and we will continue to scale and deliver services on their doorstep. As we increasingly move towards an application-driven world, F5 will be at the forefront of better enabling IT and business stakeholders to align technology to meet todays most pressing challenges - cloud enablement, security and the mobility of devices. In particular, we expect our security offerings to experience strong uptake in the coming year, concludes Allam.

With a clear vision and path to success, backed up by a strong and knowledgeable team of experts, F5 Networks is sure to flourish in 2015 and beyond. When a companys game-plan is so centred on the future, it is hard to imagine it not achieving success at that time.

Company Information

I N D U S T RY

Technology

H E A D Q U A RT E R S

Seattle

F O U N D E D

1996

E M P L O Y E E S

4,000 +

R E V E N U E

Fiscal year 2014:

$1.73 billion

P R O D U C T S /

S E R V I C E SF5 helps enterprises deliver the fastest, most secure, and most reliable applications to any user, anywhere, on any device, at any time.F5 solutions provide the flexibility enterprises need to embrace innovative deployment models (public, private, hybrid clouds; software-defined data centers), enable mobility, and protect and optimize all applications all of the time.


Business Central Towers, Floor 31

Tower A, Office 3104A, P.O. Box 502628

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Tel. (+971) 4 4333680

[email protected] / www.f5.com

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F5 Networks - Brochure